New Materialists Clothed In Irony

When Madonna brags about being a Material Girl, she isn't talking fabric:

''You know that we are living in a material world/And I am a material girl.''

Materialism, after being considered uncouth for a couple of decades, is in again. Austerity is passe; affluence is here to stay.

The feeling today is that money can't buy you happiness, but it can get you a Mercedes.

Yet just as the 1980s are in so many ways an updated version of the 1950s, so is the materialism of today a variation of the materialism of 30 years ago. The Old Materialism of the '50s was based largely on planned obsolescence. The idea was to demonstrate one's financial superiority by trading in the family conveyance every year.

You don't hear much about planned obsolescence anymore. The standard of the New Materialism is durability. The status cars of today are the ones that are supposed to last 10 or 15 years. The watches worth owning by today's standards are not just timepieces, they're long-term investments.

The New Materialists distinguish themselves from their Old Materialist parents by going after quality. Their parents may have been the first on the block to buy a television, but it was a Philco set that they traded in for a Sylvania a few years later. The New Materialists buy Curtis Mathes sets, which are advertised as the TVs that cost more but last longer.

In cities such as New York and Miami, unflappably affluent young people are moving into older neighborhoods and turning low-income housing into upscale environs -- in essence trading in the new-city suburbs of their parents for the time-tested, enduring dwellings of the older cities.

In going for durable, high-quality objects, the New Materialists may be part of a more general inclination toward things that last. In recent years, endurance has become something of an American obsession.

The proliferation of marathons, Individual Retirement Accounts and TV miniseries all point to a desire among Americans to engage in things that last longer, take longer or just seem to go on forever. Even survivalists, who don't think anything will endure much longer, stock their shelves with powdered eggs that will last longer than the planet Earth.

Of course, the Old Materialism was essentially a one-income lifestyle. The New Materialism often requires that both parents work, leaving less time for their children. New Materialist parents compensate for spending less time with their children by spending more money on them.

The result is what have been called ''designer babies'' -- children of the status-conscious middle class for whom only the best clothing, toys and education will do.

The New Materialist parents call the time they do spend with their children ''quality time'' -- implying that it is somehow more valuable, more enduring than the time that previous generations spent with their children.

Designer babies may be the greatest irony of the New Materialism. Reared on quality time, many of them are growing up to become Madonna ''wannabes'' attired in the trashy fashions of their idol.